Crestline, Robson, and Merom - Intel is bringing together a host of technologies for Santa Rosa, its next gen platform

Merom, Intel's next-generation is slated for release at the end of
2006. Interestingly, Yonah is still pretty young but the
next-generation beyond Yonah is already well under way. What follows
Merom's release however, is definitely interesting and in a very
serious way, compliments the new architectures to enable such features
as instant-on and instant-off. Intel is pushing these technologies as
part of its Viiv platform, and while we will see a lot of the neat
technologies appear on mobile systems first, plans are underway to
bring the same technologies to the desktop.

After Intel's Napa paltform, Santa Rosa is next for Intel
along with the release of Crestline, Intel's next-generation mobile
chipset. Crestline will bring along new features that utilize NAND
flash memory. Intel says the technology, called Robson, is incorporated
with Crestline (as part of the Santa Rosa platform) and allows critical
OS systems to be cached to the non volatile memory. This way, the NAND
memory will be used as a boot drive and may be able to include common
applications as well.

Intel demonstrated Robson using OS boot times and application
loads. The demonstration took place on a NAND enabled system and one
without, and in many cases the one with Robson showed 4 to 5 times the
performance of a legacy system. For mobility users, Intel also says
that using NAND flash technology, battery power will be preserved
because there is a higher performance-per-watt ratio on a NAND-enabled
system vs. a legacy HDD-only based system. Intel also recently invested
heavily into Micron, to create a new joint venture on producing NAND
flash memory and NAND based products.

According
to Intel, Robson-enabled notebooks and desktops will start to see the
light in early 2007. While Crestline, and Merom will not be launching
all together, Intel promises a culmination of all the above
technologies in Santa Rosa.